Going to the moon & complaining about it

Tag Archives: Rabid Puppies

The last finalist in the Best Related Work category is Jeffro Johnson’s “The First Draft of My Appendix N Book”. It’s a post published in Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog last November, and I don’t know why the Hugo administrators have decided to include it like this. I guess the point was to nominate the whole of Johnson’s Appendix N project — that is, the batch of 50+ articles that the blog post links to.

The Rabid Puppies slate (which is probably the driving force behind Johnson’s getting on the finalist list) included the item “Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson” and linked to a post titled “Appendix N Matters”. That is the final chapter which delivers some jabs against the “politically correct” “thought police” that has “taken over# “our culture” — so I can see why Theodore Beale likes to send readers that way, but the bulk of Johnson’s Appendix N project is, luckily, about something else.

Category: Related WorkSlate: Rabid Puppies

But let’s start at the beginning. What the hell is Appendix N, anyway? The title probably leaves most people scratching their heads.

Appendix N is a list of fantasy works that Gary “The Father of Role Playing Games” Gygax mentioned in the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook Dungeon Master’s Guide back in 1979 with “the following authors were of particular inspiration to me”.

In Castalia House Blog, Jeffro Johnson has been reading through Gygax’s list and blogging about it since 2014. The first 15 chapters were published in 2014, and some of them I already read last year when Johnson was finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo. The last 29 “official” chapters as well as some appendices and extra stuff that Johnson plans to cut were published last year (and are eligible now).

Johnson’s idea is not completely original. In 2013, Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode did the exact same thing with their Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons series. Reading some of their thoughts on the Appendix N books alongside Johnson’s series offers an interesting comparison.

I have to say that I enjoyed Callahan and Knode’s take on it significantly more (even though they are dead wrong about Zelazny’s Amber series), but the reason might be that it’s written for a general (or, at least, more general) audience. Johnson is quicker to dive into the intricacies of Dungeons and Dragons which I have never played and do not really care about. He gives lengthy quotes from books and points out D&D stuff that they relate to, and that’s not a very good way to keep me interested.

I did take a look at some of the chapters that deal with books and authors I’m familiar with (a minority, I’m sad to say): Dunsany, Moorcock, Leiber, Farmer, Lovecraft and so on. On top of that, I read few about writers I know next to nothing about, like Gardner F. Fox.

And it’s a mixed bag: some of Johnson’s points were profoundly interesting, some were not and some were deep in wait-what-that’s-not-right territory. Here are examples of all the three:

The setup of Leiber’s Lankhmar stories captures quintessential features of D&D. (Or, as Knode phrased the same point, they are the most Dungeons and Dragons of anything on the Appendix N list.

Elric has so much contempt for honor that real tabletop gamers would whack him.

Lovecraft’s great attention to detail in his writing makes his tales feel very real.

Even though I don’t care about D&D, I respect Johnson’s mission to educate people about the early alternatives to Tolkienesque fantasy which has later taken over and plagues the genre like a fucking leprosy. The science fantasy tradition is fascinating and it’s truly regrettable that it got pushed out of the market back in the day. Or, to be more exact, the worst thing is that it got forgotten and very few casual contemporary fantasy readers know about this stuff.

On the other hand, Johnson takes it all so very seriously. In his concluding and judgemental rant he seems to treat the Appendix as an authoritative, sacred canon that defines which books of the period are worth taking a look at instead of just a list of titles that Gygax happened to read and enjoy.

A tad pompously, Johnson informs us that

[Appendix N] preserves a sense of who we were… and what we could yet become again if we chose to.

Johnson has his headpalm moments when he suggests that, for example, the Earthsea books shouldn’t be on the list because

the defeating of Lovecraftian terrors with the power of friendship really isn’t how anyone handles adventures in a mythical underworld.

Too unrealistic ways to handle adventures in a mythical underworld? Come on. It might be an un-AD&D-ish book, but Zelazny’s Amber books have next to nothing to do with AD&D either. Gygax’s take on why there’s no LeGuin on his list would be interesting to hear but Johnson’s second guessing is not that convincing. On the other hand, I’m ready to forgive him because he plugs Tarzan of the Apes.

But despite Tarzan, my ultimate response is that I feel my time would have been better used if I had read a couple of these books instead of wading through Johnson’s assorted commentary.

Is his Appendix N project a nice thing to have around? Yeah, why not. Is it good enough to be recognized as the absolute best work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy or fandom that was published last year? That’s a tougher one.

Many interesting things were again left off-ballot because of the slate-voting organized by Johnson’s employer — consider the essay collections Speculative Fiction 2014 (edited by Renee Williams and Shaun Duke) and Letters to Tiptree (edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce), or David Langford’s interview collection Crosstalk, or the non-fiction books on Iain M. Banks (by Simone Caroti), Ray Bradbury (by David Seed), Lois McMaster Bujold (by Edward James) and Frederik Pohl (by Michael R. Page). Like last year, it’s a shame.

Johnson certainly isn’t the worst finalist here, but is he good enough? I’m not sure yet.

In case you’re reading this, you probably have an opinion on the former disco musician and current book publisher, editor and anti-feminist/anti-anti-racist/contrarian political demagogue and culture warrior Theodore Beale aka Vox Day. I don’t think I’m going to influence anybody here, but here’s my case against the writer of SJWs Always Lie in case somebody wants to read an affectionate character assassination of the king of anti-progressive internet trolls.

Category: Related WorkSlates: Rabid Puppies

So, who is Vox Day?

His father is the failed businessman, tax protester and felon Robert Beale who tried to get Pat “Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” Robertson the president of the United States in the late 80s. Fortunately, that didn’t go so well, but the senior Beale made a serious shitload of money running his business, and I guess that family wealth has served Vox Day pretty well. At least one hopes that his livelyhood isn’t dependent on the success of works like his Hugo-nominated short story “Opera Vita Aeterna” (2014) — which, in my opinion, is not very good (go ahead and google it if you want to read what sort of fiction he writes).

Vox Day first became known as a member of the 90s techno band Psykosonik. If you’ve ever wondered about what his music sounds like, here’s a song called “Shock on the Wire” from their debut album Psykosonik (1993).

Considering some of Beale’s later political stances, the lyrics about leaving “the world of boolean gender” bring a smile upon my face.

According to all Beale’s author bios, he is also a professional game designer who has designed games such as the first-person Christian sword-em-up War in Heaven (1999). It was based on his fantasy novels, the first of which Natalie Luhrs read and live-tweeted last year in order to raise money for RAINN (an organization helping victims of sexual assault).

I’m not really sure if designing games is something that Beale/Day is doing at the moment. There isn’t much information around on what game projects he has been working on lately, and his blogging and book-writing looks like a full-time job, judging by his publishing frequency.

He writes the general “Alt Right”, Trump-praise and Hugo destruction blog Vox Popoli (bad Latin for voice of the people) as well as the white and straight men’s right activism blog Alpha Game (which informs us that there are, in fact, not only alpha males and beta males but also deltas, gammas, omegas, sigmas and lambdas, and it’s all hopelessly complicated). In his nonfiction books, Beale has opined that atheists are irrational, “cuckservatives” (=moderate conservatives) are destroying the American civilization and “SJWs” (=social justice warriors) always lie.

As I said in the beginning, pretty much everybody who has read something about or by Beale/Day already has an opinion of him, so I’m fairly sure that this blog post is not going to convince anybody to change their views. Besides, in the title of the book that is on the Hugo shortlist this year, Beale has already formulated a statement that refutes everything I’m about to say here. I believe that social justice is desirable and discrimination should be done away with. Thus, I lie and Beale-believers shouldn’t believe anything I say.

If you don’t have an opinion on Beale yet and you want to see for yourself what he is up to, I suggest you take a look at Vox Popoli. A couple of posts will probably be enough to get a good picture.

I just tried this approach myself few weeks ago and first came up with a screed for why war is better than peace because during peacetime, I guess, people can live their lives the way they want:

Seventy years of relative peace and prosperity has made our young men hedonists and homosexuals, cravens and cowards who are more inclined to literally emasculate themselves than demonstrate even a modicum of courage. Seventy years of relative tranquility and safety has made our young women into shameless sluts and whores, barren harridans and harpies devoid of self-respect and self-control. (“A Terrible Peace”, 13/5/2016)

I also learned that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote in representative democracies (a direct democracy is another thing, though), because they are not as intelligent as men and cannot understand difficult issues:

I don’t have a problem with women voting in a direct democracy of the sort we have in national referenda. I think that women are perfectly capable of understanding the consequences of their actions — when it’s a direct matter. However, in the quasi-democratic systems that we have, the limited representative democracies, the problem is that it is historically far too easy for demagogues to manipulate women. (“Should Women Vote”, 14/5/2016)

What an angry, unhappy dude, right?

His views are so far removed from the real reality where I (and maybe you too) live, that it’s impossible to even start debunking those statements. For me (and, hopefully, for you) the freedom to live my life how I want without fear of dying in an armed conflict is quite nice. On the other hand, stripping people of their equal rights because of their sex or gender is not.

These are axioms, and they’re not up for debate.

His opinion seems to be that people’s lives should be miserable. How do you make a case for that shit? Well, after reading the Kindle sample of SJWs Always Lie (which is enough to get the gist of it, in my opinion), it turns out that Beale doesn’t make a case for that shit at all. In the first chapter, he throws himself into a tantrum about the bad things that bad people working for social justice are pushing for.

A broad-based, reality-based resistance to the mirage is now taking shape, a resistance that will eventually undermine and replace all the old institutions that have been invaded and captured by the SJWs. And all it takes to be a part of it is a refusal to accept the religion of social justice, a refusal to bow down before the false gods of Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, Inclusiveness and Progress.

Alright. Everything above this line was written a few weeks back, but now that the Hugo Voter’s Packet is finally out and SJWs Always Lie is included (I believe that ignoring that would have been a better option but Midamericon II decided otherwise) I took a look.

It’s a funny collection of eccentric viewpoints and all-around handwaving when the social opinions get too difficult to defend otherwise.

Here’s a chapter by chapter summary of the first six chapters after the intro:

Chapter 2: The Three Laws of SJW

Beale’s thesis: John Scalzi said in an interview he has more blog readers than Beale thinks he does. Thus, SJWs always lie.

After coining this and a couple of other rules, Beale drives himself into an ecstatic snicker when he describes how he has pestered Scalzi by cunningly claiming that the best-selling author has admitted to being a rapist, even though he hasn’t. So, what’s Beale’s point? SJWs always lie, but their opponents make up lies that are more stupid?

Chapter 3: When SJWs Attack

Beale’s thesis: A number of people in high positions have ended up in trouble or lost their jobs after insulting women or minorities publicly. That’s why, by some magical logic, everyone who complains about powerful men behaving badly is suspect.

Beale makes a big thing out of the controversy over biochmemist and molecular physiologist Tim Hunt’s impromptu toast speech during the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists. He has cherry-picked a good example, considering that Hunt was treated rather badly for his remarks which, by all accounts, were meant to be humorous instead of sexist — he concluded his toast by saying “science needs women, and you should do science despite all obstacles, and despite monsters like me”. (It’s probably a stretch to call Hunt an actual feminist, but for a privileged academic dude who was born in the 40s he doesn’t seem too bad.)

What Beale doesn’t tell his readers is that Hunt has explicitly denounced his sort of defenders. In an interview with the Guardian, the scientist said: “I was turned into a straw man that one lot loves to love and the other lot loves to hate and then they just take up sides and hurled utterly vile abuse at everyone.”

I see why Beale focuses on Hunt and not on the other names he drops, like the scientist James “We Should Genetically Engineer All Girls Beautiful” Watson, Pax “A Talented Female Tech Developer Is As Mythical As A Unicorn” Dickinson or Mozilla’s ex-CEO and California Proposition 8 supporter Brendan Eich. (I don’t get why Beale can’t afford a proofreader if he is so damn successful — in addition to all the Latin stuff, he misspells Dickinson’s name.)

Chapter 4: Counterattack

Beale’s thesis: Zoë Quinn is fat and unattractive and she made a depressing game about depression (and cheated on her boyfriend). That’s why #Gamergate is such a good thing — and, by the way, the only thing the movement is interested in is Ethics In Gaming Journalism. Like, totally. All accounts of harassment by gamergaters are untrue because I say so.

These days, you can’t make a gaming-related Youtube video and mention feminism or tweet about an academic game studies conference with the #DiGRA hashtag without getting a ton of abuse directed at you, in the best case scenario. If things go worse, some Dude Only Concerned About Ethics In Gaming Journalism is going to make a game where the point is to beat your face to pulp, doxx you, drive you out of your home and probably kill your dog.

But I’m not doing the #GamerGate movement justice here. Speaking of DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), they have brightened up many people’s days with their more unwitting operations, such as this one. Appreciating all the ironies may require some background knowledge on the critical theory.

After Hunt, though, it’s nice to see Beale trying to piggyback on some people I don’t feel bad for.

Chapter 5: Release the Hounds

Beale’s thesis: John Scalzi has won way too many Hugo awards. That’s why Worldcon, Hugos and WSFS are rotten.

In this chapter, Beale goes through the Sad Puppies history, putting a wild anti-SJW spin on everything. For the people who are aware of what went down with the Hugos during the last couple of years (and if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you indeed are), it’s mostly rehashing the official Puppy narrative put together by Correia and Torgersen.

The only interesting parts deal with Beale’s involvement with the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. Last year, Torgersen and Correia were adamant that their thing really doesn’t have anything to do with Beale’s, but what do you know. Here we have Beale reminiscing about the first meeting of the slate-makers in January 16, 2015. Present are Beale, Correia, Torgersen, Tom Kratman, Sarah Hoyt and John C. Wright.

Beale says that they soon found out they disagreed on the goals:

To put these goals in practical terms, Brad wanted to actually try to win awards for what he deemed to be meritorious work, whereas I thought we ought to nominate whatever would most upset the SJWs and then turn around and join them in voting No Award for everything in order to leave a smoking hole where the 2015 Hugos had been. […]

After discussing our differences, I stepped back from Sad Puppies and created Rabid Puppies, an allied campaign designed around the #GamerGate model. […] However, the SJWs so hated everything Brad put forward, and reacted so negatively towards those works, that instead of needing a completely separate list of recommendations, the Rabid Puppy list turned out to be a little more than the Sad Puppy list with a few tactical additions intended to further enrage the SJWs.

The quote above is recommended reading for everybody who is still pondering whether the Rabid Puppies contingent has some reasonable grievances. Here we have Theodore Beale/Vox Day telling us earnestly that he isn’t interested in making science fiction great again, or plugging worthy but overlooked works — what he wants is to troll and upset people.

What an angry, unhappy dude.

In the end of the chapter, Beale goes through his, Peter Grant’s and other puppie’s unsuccessful campaign to get the Tor Books creative director Irene Gallo fired by bombing Macmillan with email complaints. Just two chapters ago threatening people’s livelihood because of their opinions was reprehensible but with Beale you have to get used to goalposts moving in supersonic speed.

Chapter 6: The SJW Next Door

Beale’s thesis: Codes of conduct and other documents outlining the proper practices in organizations and corporations are pushed forward by SJWs. Thus, they are evil.

And so on and so forth

I quickly lost interest after chapter six. Beale tells us what one should do when SJWs attack and how to fight back but, frankly, it seems like incredibly hard and unrewarding work. Sure, you can try to be as unapologetic asshole as you can and make things as hard as possible for the other side if you want — but what’s the point?

Instead of Beale’s sixteen rules and strategies about what to do when you’re under attack and how to fight back et cetera, I can offer you the following two-rule all-purpose guide for free:

Respect other people and don’t insult them.

If you happen to break rule #1, be a grownup and own up to your mistakes.

There you go. This has served great many people quite well. World may be full of unreasonable assholes but I don’t see how becoming one would make my life, or yours, any easier.

On the other hand, you’re free to believe Beale but the tin foil conspiracist mindset he says we all should adopt sounds like something that is not going to do any good for anybody’s well-being. Consider quotes like this:

It may seem a little ironic to have to police your organization yourself in order to prevent it from being thought-policed, but the sad historical fact is that you have to choose between one and the other.

Little ironic? You don’t say.

It’s a bad book by a bad actor and it shouldn’t get a Hugo award, if you ask me. No reason to trust me, though — you can read it for free if you’re a Hugo voter and make up your mind.

Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Score: 0/10

Some final thoughts

I recognize that there probably is a meaningful discussion to be had or a book written about the excesses of the uses of “social justice”. SJWs Always Lie isn’t that book, though, but cases like the one involving Tim Hunt are incredibly bad for the social justice movement. As a supporter of that movement, I feel that the goal should be to become mainstream rather than to take all the possible scalps. Twitter shame mobs easily go too far and things turn ugly, as anyone who has been paying attention should know by now.

Or, if you haven’t been convinced yet, this TED Talk by Jon Ronson is for you.

Earlier this year I read Will Shetterly’s book How to make a Social Justice Warrior. To be fair, it probably wasn’t the good book that ought to be written about these issues either, but Shetterly at least tries. For me, his ranty style and short temper made him sound even crazier than Beale in places, unfortunately.

However, Shetterly makes some relevant points about how single-minded focus on identity politics erases class distinctions — which still remain extremely important when analyzing power structures and inequality. A person of color, or a woman, or a homosexual can become president, but a poor person will probably never be able to do that. At the very least, Shetterly’s left-wing criticism of SJW-ism is more convincing than Beale’s right-wing variant.

Some of the more theoretical flavors of academic feminism are probably quite far removed from the social reality of anybody who doesn’t belong to the middle class and has to struggle every day to make ends meet. That may be an oversimplification, but it’s something that feminists with higher education (and the worldview of an extremely privileged individual that comes with it), such as myself, should perhaps consider more often.

I haven’t read much of Gene Wolfe’s work, even though everybody tells me it’s fantastic. There are 25 novels and almost 10 short story collections, so deciding where one should start feels like a chore in itself (maybe we can christen it as the Moorcock Dilemma).

That’s a problem for this year’s Hugo reading, obviously, because one of the candidates in the category of Best Related Work is a book called Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini. It’s a tome that goes through Wolfe’s works one by one, providing analysis, discussion and interpretations — and it’s quite useless for anybody who hasn’t read the original works first.

I run into the author Marc Aramini online and he suggested I read a couple of short stories before checking his analyses: Suzanne Delage (1980) (available online), The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories (1970) (available online in audio form, but I happened to have it around in translation) and The Changeling (1968) (not available online, but the short story collection Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days which includes it is, in turn, included in the collection Castle of Days, available for Kindle at Amazon). (Here’s a handy list of other online Wolfe shorts, by the way.)

I read these stories and enjoyed The Island and The Changeling enormously (Suzanne Delage not that much). Then I read Aramini’s analyses which were interesting, even though he reads them in a slightly different way than I and focuses much more on deciphering the “real” answers. Being something of a Wolfe n00b, writing a book review about all the questions that I found myself wondering didn’t seem like the best option.

Instead, I interviewed Aramini who was kind enough to anwer all my questions in depth via email. Hopefully this exchange will be interesting to other people as well and provide some context for the book. As far as I know, it will be included in the Hugo voter packet that is going to be sent out soon.

Between Light and Shadow was published by Vox Day’s / Theodore Beale’s Castalia House, includes a preface by John C. Wright and was gamed on the Hugo ballot by the Rabid Puppies slate. I’m sure that’s quite a severe triple handicap for a lot of Hugo voters, and I don’t know yet how I’ll be voting on this category myself.

However, discussing the works of great writers is always fun and enlightening.

So, here it is:

First, tell a little about yourself. What made you a Wolfe fan?

I have held a lot of jobs: a high school and community college teacher of both Biology and English, performing a handstand act in a circus (amidst other responsibilities), working in banking and in gyms, but I think much of my interest in books and in SF/fantasy in particular comes from a childhood that felt ever so slightly lonely. My parents were both in the military, though throughout my life it was my mother and her duty stations that determined where we lived and moved to. I was raised as an only child, and my earliest memories are of living in Europe and having only the most rudimentary grasp of the language spoken around me. Many of my happiest (and most empathetic) moments came from exploring the SF that spoke to me so strongly when I began to read seriously.

I first encountered Gene Wolfe in about the fourth grade, and almost immediately I felt as if, even though I might not fully understand him, he would understand me completely. His first truly successful story, “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” is the perfect exploration of a lonely childhood populated with friends, heroes, and not-so-evil villains from books – all figures which help us mature and understand the complex world around us.

In graduate school about more than a decade and a half ago, I came across Wolfe’s mailing address, and to my surprise, he answered my letter. Our correspondence over the years solidified my impression that this wonderful writer was also a generous and kind man, worthy of the respect I had for him in every way. I guess all of this is saying that I am merely a fan who loves Gene Wolfe. Somehow, that feeling of love, respect, and awe grew into this monster of a project, which attempts to analyze everything he has ever published.

What’s the story behind your Hugo-nominated book Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986?

The internet age connected readers in a way I could never have imagined as a child, and part of that wonder involved exploring what other people thought about Wolfe and his complex work. In 2012 he was honored with the Fuller Award in a beautiful, unforgettable ceremony in Chicago. I had been posting my ideas about Wolfe’s work probably since about the year 1999 or so online, and it shocked me when I introduced myself to someone at that event – a nearby person, overhearing it, recognized my name, so very far away from home. It was a community the like of which I had never encountered in person before.

As I spoke with some of the other prominent fans there, we came to the conclusion that his early work and many of his brilliant short stories had been completely neglected. My overarching character flaw is pride, so in my hubris I told them when I got home I would start analyzing his early stories in painstaking detail and hopefully engender discussion on the Urth Mailing List, probably the most consistently interesting center for discussion of Gene Wolfe online. I had no idea until I was about forty write-ups in that this would be publishable, and its chaotic beginning necessitated ridiculous amounts of editing.

The total project will contain 246 essays, and I have 12 left to finish. Without a doubt this was the most difficult thing I have ever undertaken in my life, because Wolfe is quite frankly not only brilliant and ridiculously allusive, but also extremely subtle. I wrote this for Wolfe fans knowing it would never be a commercially viable project, and I am happy that someday soon they will have a hardback version — if it fails to answer some of the questions they have, I feel it is successful in giving them a starting point, because each and every story involved more leg work than a casual fan might believe. I can only imagine how much research and thought went into the construction of most of these stories in the pre-internet age — staggering. And even after four years of serious writing and research, I still get the feeling that Wolfe is often a few steps ahead of me.

So, there’s going to be a second volume?

The second volume, Beyond Time and Memory, is “almost” done, but it is trending a bit long at this point. Hopefully I can get it in one volume, as I intended, and completed in the next few months.

What are your own favorites in Wolfe’s oeuvre and what makes them your favorites?

The magical experience of coming upon The Book of the New Sun as a child and experiencing a unique mix of religious sentiment, SF elements, philosophy (both pragmatic and abstract), and interesting characters partaking in mysterious events will forever set it as one of my favorites. As an adult, I appreciate The Book of the Short Sun, the Latro books, and so many of his novellas: “Seven American Nights,” “Forlesen,” “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” and the stories that play with that title.

The sense of depth, wonder, and intelligence behind his construction always seemed to me on the level of the greatest Modernist writers respected in mainstream fiction, but with the bizarre themes that I find innately interesting. Identity, memory, perception, loneliness, apotheosis, mortality, morality, and the clash between ancient but perhaps instinctive belief systems and the ever changing modern world are all explored in his fiction in a way that is paradoxically both dream-like and cogent.

As a dedicated Wolfe fan, are there any works by Wolfe that you don’t particularly like?

I tend to appreciate them all on re-reading. Some are more confounding than others. Once I figured out There Are Doors I loved it, and the same may be said of “The Adopted Father” — once I understood it as a metaphor for the writing of science fiction and fantasy tales and how he views his readers, the affection in my breast for Wolfe as a creator grew. Neither of those stories impressed me the first time through.

I acknowledge that some of his stories are not as fun to read before the sub-text is understood. (The short story “Bloodsport” comes to mind – for a bit I doubted that I could make much of the story, but eventually my research paid off.) Wolfe also has a habit of changing his style to suit each project, so readers looking for a Book of the New Sun every time will definitely be disappointed initially.

Do you have some other favorite authors besides Wolfe?

Yes! Laurence Sterne, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Yukio Mishima, Proust (though largely because of Wolfe), Vladimir Nabokov, Roger Zelazny, Theodore Sturgeon, R.A. Lafferty, William Faulkner, Jack Vance, and Jorge Luis Borges are a pretty good start there. One of my favorite books to actually read through, however, was The Norton Anthology of English Literature — especially the poetry and drama before the realistic and naturalistic novel came to dominate the literary scene.

Are you connected to academia or are you strictly a non-academic scholar?

I have taught college English before, but currently this is only my hobby. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of getting my doctorate someday — I think in a perfect world I would have been a college teacher for most of my adult life… where else could I listen to myself talk for hours at a time in front of a captive audience? On a more serious note, sharing my passion and appreciation for intricate and beautiful art has always been one of the motivating features of my character. In my arrogance I assume that I can share some of that love with others.

What Wolfe’s works would you suggest for somebody like me who has read very little by Wolfe and wants to give him a try?

The Book of the New Sun, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace for mainstream readers, or The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and The Best of Gene Wolfe for his most enduring short stories. (And if they feel lost, hopefully my commentaries can help a little bit!)

[Note: The Wolfe Wiki gives a similar and a bit more elaborate answer in its A Novice’s Guide that may be of help for other people in my situation.]

I just read an article on Wolfe and his work by Hannu Blommila. He said, among other things, that “Wolfe seems to have a steady, almost childlike trust on the reader’s intelligence and persistence.”

Do you think that’s a fair assessment? Is the confidence Wolfe’s texts have on the readers’ abilities to make sense of them part of the charm?

Definitely. I am never bored reading a Wolfe story because it relies on that active participation. In his best work, the story is satisfying even when you haven’t quite grasped the significance of his sub-text. Whether that faith is well-placed or not is still up for debate. It could very well be that he has far too much faith in us. There are only a few authors that require that kind of active participation, and most of those are well known for their challenging aspects (like the later work of James Joyce, as an obvious example — but Wolfe’s fiction is at its best fun to read even without that deep investment).

The couple of your commentaries that I read from Between Light and Shadow put very much emphasis on finding out what is it that really happens in the story. On “The Changeling”, you wrote: “…it might be the first analysis where multiple solutions for the simple question ‘what happened here?’ can be entertained”.

Do you think of Wolfe’s stories as puzzles to be solved?

Yes, because I buy into the validity of intent.

Two people who work in plumbing, construction, electronics, or automobiles can communicate with each other even if they don’t speak the same language because they share objective knowledge in their specialty. The engineering, scientific mind of Wolfe creates patterns of meaning that reflect back on the plot. I think much of his writing involves writing around a very clear outline without revealing the entirety of his plan, only hinting at it. Thus, in a novel about religious syncretism in the ancient world, a bull being killed gains a symbolic resonance (Mithras, Sol, sacrifice) that is present in the text regardless of whether the reader picks up on the allusion – because the author was aware of it when he wrote the story (especially if the author was Wolfe).

Thus, I feel I could have failed badly in my task (and that others have forced solutions on Wolfe which do not actually explain the small details in the text). In that way I see much of his fiction as elaborate, deep, and maddeningly sophisticated word problems. Perhaps there are at times multiple solutions that seem to fit the details that we have, but I honestly believe that the author had a particular solution in mind when drafting the novel, and his cryptic tendencies are shared by a few self-conscious creators. Wolfe is good at creating extremely elaborate and entertaining puzzles.

Is there a “right” answer to questions like “what has really happened between the protagonist and Suzanne Delage in ‘Suzanne Delage'” or “which one is the changeling in ‘The Changeling'”?

I’m asking this because I kind of enjoyed the ambiguous atmosphere and the weight of the unexplained in those stories, and while I was reading them I didn’t necessarily feel that there should be one comprehensive solution to be unearthed.

Yes, but you don’t have to get there to enjoy the story. I honestly believe there is a “right” answer from the author’s point of view, but that there are other authors who do not have this kind of rigid, disciplined mindset and write from a place of the subconscious or unconscious. I really do not feel that this is the case with Wolfe, and I have written about 700,000 words so far between the two volumes which argue that his mysteries have universal solutions. I think one of his tasks is using the tool-box of post-modern subjectivity and uncertainty to imply that there is still a universal structure behind the act of creation.

However, any reader’s response about their own reaction to the text or how it engages with reality is of course valid. Much like a math word problem, I think readers can get the author’s intended solution “wrong” — thus I separate reading into objective interpretation and subjective response — in Wolfe, I insist that the sub-text is often a part of objective interpretation. (This is not a popular mindset in late 20th century thought — but it is also the reason for all of the effort I put into each and every write-up: I could completely and utterly get it wrong and fail in the task I have set for myself.)

For more on this idea, see Wolfe’s story “Trip-Trap” and my commentary on it — in that story, the spiritual world is more objectively real than the subjective narratives each of the participants construct about themselves.

You said you have corresponded with Wolfe. Has he read your analyses or commented on them?

Wolfe is notoriously silent and cagey about his work. Once upon a time he answered some minor questions. Let me only say that one of my most controversial conclusions actually originated with Wolfe, and that his affirmations are equally oblique: on my reading of “The Changeling,” he merely said, “I always loved ‘Lil Abner’.”

He is very good at dodging direct questions, and I try never to press that issue in our correspondence. I think he feels that giving readers a definitive solution is “cheating.”

I’m not very well-read on Wolfeology. Are there differing schools of thought among the more hardcore Wolfe aficionados on how his works should be interpreted? How do you position yourself in that scene?

Oh yes. There are many who are much more open to less authoritative readings and emphasize that the reader creates meaning, advocating that there isn’t really a solution. I think that there is a type of writer who subverts universal meaning (say, William Burroughs, for example) but that Wolfe writes with quite deliberate patterns in mind. Some critics don’t stick closely enough to the text in their theories for my taste (here I will name Borski, since he is a published Wolfe scholar) and others force a preconceived and overwhelming naturalistic agenda on a fairly religious writer (and here I am referring to Peter Wright).

You can find in the Urth Mailing List thousands of pages of discourse on Wolfe’s use of myth, biblical themes, or obscure ur-texts as interpretational keys. I think the text should always come first, with the symbolism of Catholic ritual and tradition to supplement that interpretation coming next, followed by classical and mythical allusions. Hopefully good readings are possible without having to scour ancient Greek manuscripts, simply by reading the novels and stories Wolfe actually wrote.

A quote from Nick Gevers: “As a very subtle but also very emphatic Roman Catholic propagandist, Wolfe is commanding us to perceive our bodies and our physical surroundings for the pale mortal envelopes that they are, and rise into the divine light. Any godless secular world, he declares, is Hell, a place where any solutions are temporary, partial, empty.”

Do you think that’s a good characterization of Wolfe? Is Wolfe’s faith central to his art? Is the cross on your book’s cover art a hint to that direction?

Yes, the cross and the emphasis on symbols on the cover definitely plays with this idea, but the difference between your typically sincere Catholic or Christian writer is the almost obsessive over-thinking that Wolfe brings to every task.

In the first volume of The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe has the Chatelaine Thecla say, “One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past — they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

That is a sharp and biting indictment of religious thought, and it is not directly overturned. (The answer to the second part is ensconced in theodicy, the explanation of evil in a world created by an all-benevolent power — that the world must be free so that our choices for good mean something, and that in a free world, terrible things will happen and go unpunished — if virtue was always rewarded instantly, where then is the power of the moral choice? Instead of meaningful actions, we become trapped in a system without free will to avoid immediate punishment.)

Wolfe’s fiction grapples with these very challenging ideas, and we often see characters abandon their faith and descend into despair. The rational, observant, and human figure of Wolfe makes faith as complex as it can be, not simple propaganda. For all the Christ imagery associated with Severian, one is still left questioning at the end of everything if any good at all came of it, or simply more death and pain. However, I do not think that Wolfe quite takes the almost Gnostic point of view which Gevers does — the secular world, too, is part and parcel of creation, and not innately bad or good. If it becomes Hell, it is often through human agency.

Wolfe seems to be something of a writers’ writer in the sense that many successful authors (Swanwick, Gaiman, Le Guin) are his fans. Why do you think that is? Do you think that Wolfe has influenced the way other authors write in some way?

Part of it, especially in his work in the 1970s and 1980s, stems from the fact that he integrates so many writing tricks while still producing a satisfying surface narrative with so many complexities underneath, something writers tend to notice. The thematic structure, implied detail, mix of subtle and heavy-handed symbolism, and characterization all blend together quite well in his best work.

Unfortunately, while the themes and stories may have influenced some authors, the worldview that Wolfe often espouses does not seem to be as pervasive in younger writers. So much of the power of his fiction comes from the sincere look at the numinous and mysterious while never abandoning rational thought. It seems that now instead of unifying the mind of the engineer and the spiritualist, most writers tend to be far less streamlined, espousing positivism or a chaotic and raw spirituality or religion devoid of rational consideration.

Wolfe’s exploration of the inner spiritual world is never useless or completely abstract because he is able to meaningfully tie those themes into his plot and characters, showing them struggle with doubt and meaning in ways that, at least in my opinion, are not off-putting to even the least spiritually inclined individual. Some readers might even take The Book of the Long Sun as a criticism of the Catholic Church and its rituals.

Do you share the opinion that contemporary SFF is in general not as good or interesting as it used to be? If so, do you think it has to do with the poetics of the field or rather with larger-scale aesthetic/ideological/etc. shifts in society?

I actually enjoy the grittier turn in recent fantasy literature, and appreciate more surrealistic techniques in fiction. At the risk of sounding older than I am, I do think that turning away from a classical education born of tradition may have hampered the depth and richness of much serious writing, because I ascribe to the now almost controversial belief that good fiction says something universal about the human condition, regardless of who and where we are, and that it is worthwhile to engage with that tradition or we risk forgetting something important about humanity as a whole, where we have been and why we made the choices that we did.

Thus, I applaud the turn to literary, symbolic, and complex themes in SF, but am a bit saddened by the loss of our ability to appreciate narratives that seem out of date or don’t jive with our current agendas. The American and English SF and Fantasy of the 1970s almost seems as if it came from a completely different culture in hindsight. For example, the criticism of Wolfe that I most frequently see involves his treatment of women and their hyper-sexualization, but I have also read that writers like Henry Miller were considered “feminists.” Miller’s tone towards women is extremely object oriented and vulgar, and almost entirely sexualized. I can’t imagine a woman like Maytera Mint from Book of the Long Sun in his work.

I haven’t found the unique eccentric voices in modern SF that writers like Lafferty, Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and Dunsany naturally had, but I think the New Wave was a definite step in the right direction. I don’t necessarily think that that movement’s bold experimental emphasis on style and form has been continued in the field today, but I don’t read as widely as I should in it.

Are you connected to the organized SFF fandom? Do you go to conventions, vote for the Hugos or something?

Even though I have read widely in the field in the past, as an adult I tend to gravitate towards more traditional (though still often “experimental” fiction) and I consider myself first and foremost a Gene Wolfe fan. Thus, I attended the Fuller Award Ceremony in 2012 and the Nebula Awards in 2013 because of Wolfe.

Between Light and Shadow was published by Vox Day’s small press Castalia House and ended up on the Hugo ballot due to his Rabid Puppies nominating campaign. You have repeatedly said that you don’t wish to take part in political debates surrounding the Hugo awards and that your own book is as non-political as possible.

Have you been surprised by the SFF fans’ reactions to you and the book (that most of them haven’t seen yet)?

Honestly, I was a bit surprised at the vehemence of their reaction. My primary motivation was in getting a readily available hardback reference book for Wolfe’s fans, knowing that it would take immense effort and would never be commercially lucrative. I was hoping that many of the reviewers and writers I sent it to would read it and possibly mention it. Almost none did so. There was only silence.

The lack of acknowledgement was hard to reconcile with the years of obsessive effort I had put into the project. One scholar had a podcast in which he talked for about twenty minutes about what a monograph on Gene Wolfe covering his works would have to entail, and then didn’t even answer after I sent him a copy of what I had done with it. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has not been updated to include my work, though it lists even minor pamphlets on Wolfe and every other book length publication in that section, and has been updated several times since I sent one of its editors a copy.

I will not speculate as to the reasons for that deafening silence, because I do believe in the quality of my work regardless of the response it receives (at the very least, I know the years of labor that have gone into what will ultimately be two volumes). There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, Fist of Legend, in which the main bad guy berates his underling, who believes he has beaten a prominent Chinese martial artist fair and square, according to the principles of Bushido. The leader stands, beats his chest, and asks (paraphrasing), “What do you know about the way of the samurai? It is to do what must be done, regardless of the costs. For your name to be disgraced and to be cursed as a villain throughout all eternity if necessary.”

While that is way too melodramatic for the choices I made in getting my book published, I feel that I had a definite goal, which I achieved: a quality edition of holistic Wolfe scholarship, with the help of a dedicated editor, Matthew King, to make the volume as good as it could possibly be. I still feel that my work deserved better than to be ignored by the many venues I attempted to send it to and I hope that it will be considered on its own worth some day, but I know the love and effort that went into it, and I know Gene Wolfe knows that too, so I have resolved to be content with that even if few actually consider my work worthy of their time and attention.

It’s reprehensible. Moira Greyland, the daughter of fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley and science fiction fandom figure Walter Breen, was abused by her parents. Now, she is abused by Theodore “Vox Day” Beale who exploits her tragic story in his effort “destroy the Hugo awards”.

Beale’s Rabid Puppy slate campaign gamed Greyland’s essay “Moira Greyland’s Story” on the Hugo ballot. It was published in an anti-gay rights blog called Ask the Bigot which probably tells everything you need to know about the context.

First, Greyland goes through her childhood experiences and her attempts to get her father convicted for his crimes. The subject matter is dreadful, but Greyland writes well and her story is powerful.

I admire her for her bravery. That admiration is hard to reconcile with the way I feel about the ending of her essay, however.

Greyland says that she thinks gays are more likely to molest their children than straight people. She backs the claim up with a link to a research by the ultra conservative fringe lobby group Family Research Council. What Greyland doesn’t tell (in case she is aware of it at all, of course) is that mainstream researchers have repeatedlydiscredited FRC’s “findings”. In addition to publishing bogus science, Family Research Council has been advocating the opinion that homosexuality is “unnatural” and “harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large”. Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them as a hate group.

I don’t think the essay should win a Hugo award, even though I sympathize with Greyland for all the pain she has gone through.

I won’t link to toxic stuff like this, but anybody who is that interested can easily google the article and see for themselves if I gave a true description of it.

Discussing my take on Daniel Eness’s factually challenged article would have been at least interesting, if nothing else, but the Beale Bros weren’t up to it. Daniel Eness (aka XDPaul) himself also chimed in with the customary insults.

I did feel a bit bad for the Campbell-nominated fantasy author Sebastien de Castell who had thrown a couple of nice and neutral comments in earlier. He got tagged in a load of uncoherent pedophile tweets in the process.

Eness kept on doubling down on his silly accusations (which is odd because I thought that according to Beale’s rules that was what SJWs are supposed to be doing but what the hell):

Here’s the thing: if there is a single Rabid Puppy supporter out there who seriously thinks that Eness’s essay has any merit, I’ll happily discuss it with them. It will take some convincing to make me believe that the smear piece wasn’t written out of sheer spite, but I promise to listen to anybody who can articulate their opinions a bit better than the two social injustice warriors above.

So: please comment.

In Beale’s blog, it was suggested that people should read Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens through Wayback Machine so that I won’t profit from my lies:

I can assure you that even though profits would be nice, I’m most certainly not seeing any, so you can safely read this page.

Update 10/5/2016:

I came across some more meta discussion about me on Beale’s blog. Even though a spectator voices some doubts, Daniel Eness is quite adamant that he managed to slaughter me on Twitter.

Pity poor me. This is hilarious.

Update 11/5/2016:

More discussion has taken place in Vox Popoli. I’ll screencap it below, because — at last — Daniel Eness and Lett Guo are even trying to offer something to back up their horror story.

I do have to give it to them: I honestly thought they were trolling on purpose, but after reading their back-and-forth with other popolists and author Sebastien de Castell, I’m beginning to realize that they actually believe what they are saying, at least some of it.

And that is baffling. I have no words, really.

But here’s the exchange:

After some commenters suggested that de Castell wasn’t taking the Rabid Puppies’ side but was actually making fun of them, the author showed up to clarify that he didn’t wish to do either:

The most interesting part begins here.

In their replies to de Castell, Lett Gou (whose name in Twitter is Lett Guo) and Eness try to describe what Rabid Puppies are up to:

That’s quite a story:

Science fiction community has been secretly covering up a mass-scale pedophilia problem for decades. If that was true, I guess even Larry Correia (who kicked off his first Sad Puppies campaign actually in 2013) and Brad R. Torgersen are complicit, because they didn’t call their opponents out on it.

Fortunately, the facts don’t add up. Walter Breen was banned from conventions already in the 60s, when molesting children wasn’t taken as seriously as it is today. Of course, it horrible that, with the help of Marion Zimmer Bradley, he could go on abusing his own children as long as he did.

The question I have asked Lett Gou/Guo and Eness on Twitter (which they keep dodging) is this: Is there a single individual in the science fiction fandom who, in 2016, thinks Breen shouldn’t have been locked away decades ago? I’m still waiting for an answer.

Yes, the crimes these people have committed are hideous. Exploiting them in order to smear your fan-political opponents is just as hideous.

Now, let’s give the author of “Space Space as Rape Room” the final word:

Here, Eness rehashes the talking points of his article, most of which don’t hold water.

Samuel R. Delany has never said that abuse is acceptable, and neither have Ellison, McCaffrey or others who defended Ed Kramer (or considered his treatment before the trial unacceptable).

Looking back, we of course now know that Nancy Collins was right about Kramer all along. The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Collins is — according to Beale’s terminology — “an SJW”. And who remembers what — according to Beale — SJWs always do?

Yeah, and this:

I am serious in that I suspect Spacefaring Kitten is a possible past victim of child molestation or a current abuser or possibly both.

New year, old tricks. I plan to read and review all Hugo finalists, but we’ll see if that is doable. The Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Cat Family is going to grow this summer by one more spacefaring kitten, so my paws might be full of associated dirty work. At least few reviews will be incoming, though, and here’s the first one.

I’m going to start with the nastiest ones so that I can get them out of my system and have a better time later on in the Hugo season. First, I’ll delve into “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness.

Eness’s five-part essay was published in the blog of Castalia House, the small press publishing company owned by the career troll Theodore “Vox Day” Beale who managed to bomb this year’s Hugo ballot. Beale’s cunning plan for this year: accusing the organized SFF fandom of SJWism and liberal leftism is not enough, so let’s mix together half-truths and obvious lies to prove that they are also pedophiles.

That’s the brief that he gave to Daniel Eness — if, in fact, there is a Daniel Eness. The guy doesn’t seem to have much of a web presence. Some person with the same name has published a few short stories, but I don’t know if it’s the same dude. (Yes, it is.) Frankly, it doesn’t matter if the essay was ghost-written by Beale himself. We can read it and see if it’s worth something or not. By now, I’m pretty sure everybody can see that my opinion is the latter one.

The essay summarizes in a couple of paragraphs the well-known criminal cases of science fiction fan Walter Breen, Dragon*Con founder and editor Ed Kramer and horror movie director Victor Salva who have been in prison (or, in Kramer’s case, house arrest) for molesting children. Breen’s wife, the fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley, died before her victims could get her convicted. In addition, Isaac Asimov’s son David Asimov was sentenced to home detention for possessing child pornography.

These are the facts. Based on them, Eness draws the conclusion that science fiction community is full of child molesting monsters.

The half-truths start with the discussion of writer Arthur C. Clarke who was accused of pedophilia in a newspaper article once. As far as I know, he was cleared in a police investigation.

Eness goes on to present list of “enablers” who are on record for saying that they believe Ed Kramer was not treated right in jail during the years that he had to wait for the trial. Defending a suspected predator does sound bad, because molesting children is one of the most horrible crimes one can think of, but none of these people say anything that would make them “pedophilia-apologists”, as Eness calls them.

Eness’s next target is John Scalzi whose crime was to not expel Kramer while he was the president of Science Fiction Writers of America. In the grand tradition of Beale’s anti-Scalzi troll attacks, Eness claims that Scalzi has admitted he is a rapist (which is a lie). He also suggests that because Scalzi didn’t mention children when he vocally demanded that conventions have policies against harassment of women, LGBTIQ people or people of color, his safe space policies “endorse and enable adult-child relationships” (which is, well, ridiculous).

After Scalzi, Eness bashes the writer Samuel R. Delany who has occasionally said some positive things about NAMBLA, The North American Man/Boy Love Association. Everyone who is interested in the details, should probably go on and read Delany’s correspondence with Will Shetterly in which the SFWA Grand Master discusses his own sexual encounters as a child. It is incredibly hard to agree with Delany on a number of things, but the exchange is interesting.

When it comes to Delany, Eness’s chosen tactic for exposing the pro-pedophilic attitudes in SFF community is cutting and pasting quotes by known SFF figures (Cat Rambo, Jo Walton, Gardner Dozois…) about Delany’s work. The quotes that praise Babel-17, Nova,Dhalgren and his other seminal works are then juxtaposed with violently pornographic excerpts from the novel Hogg. The logic of the piece is, again, fairly ridiculous.

To sum it up, Eness’s essay offers the same basic information about Breen, Zimmer Bradley et al that has been covered much better elsewhere. On top of that, he fabricates a shitload of funny evidence against Scalzi and Delany (and others Beale has a hate-boner for) who have nothing to do with the actual crimes that have taken place. Even though the topic is important and all sorts of harassment in SFF community should be discussed and brought to light, the essay is extremely worthless. Considering the way it suggests that fighting the harassment of women and minorities would enable pedophilia, it is not only worthless but also evil.

I exchanged a couple of tweets this morning with Damien Walter who has been suggesting that Midamericon II throws the ballots with the complete Rabid Puppies slate out of the window. Then, he thinks, Midamericon could reinstate the works that were pushed off the list by Theodore Beale’s slate-voting effort.

Once again, it's time to ban the Rabid Puppies. They're vandals, plain and simple. Ban and reinstate writers they pushed off the list.

I’m not expert on WSFS constitution or legal matters, but my guess is that a particular Worldcon cannot just simply do what Walter proposes. Or can they? It stands to reason that the Hugo administrators can only do the things that the WSFS constitution says they can.

@damiengwalter@MrsSheaWong Well, it's not excuse if rules make "standing up" impossible. I agree about it being vile harassment, thought.

Am I right? Is Damien right? Who knows? Gonna have to ask Kevin Standlee? The rules that you can ignore when you feel you have to are not very good rules (or rules at all), are they?

However, that got me thinking: Is there anything else that could be done in this situation?

Rules could be changed, even though it will take a while. Another problem with this approach is that persistent trolls have a tendency to dig up the loopholes, wherever they are. E Pluribus Hugo that I hope will pass this year is going to take some wind off the slate-nominators’ sails, especially if the campaign is built around a small number of people sending in identical ballots (which probably describes this year better than last year).

The rules guru Kevin Standlee and others have talked about intituting a third voting round in order to stop undesirable candidates before they get onto the final ballot. That would probably stop all puppy takeovers (and there may be other good technical solutions floating around), but I’m not certain that it would feel worthwhile during normal Hugo years.

In my opinion, nominating, voting and caring about the Hugos should be as easy and simple as possible, and it’s already too complicated as is (because of the arcane categories). In the very least, extra voting rounds and such should not be the standard procedure but rather something that a significant number of Worldcon members could initiate as a safety measure in case of exceptional circumstances (like a hostile takeover by trolls who have stated explicitly that their intention is to destroy the award).

On the other hand: Would an easier solution be just to grant the administering Worldcon a right to disqualify a candidate that is put on the ballot through means that are clearly in conflict with the spirit of the awards? I don’t know.

Rule changes are slow, however, so they don’t help in the current situation — where we indeed have a hostile takeover by trolls who have stated explicitly that their intention is to destroy the award. Among the Hugo finalists, there are works that include blatant hate-speech, fat-shaming, misogyny et cetera. Overall, it’s more horrible than last year, when the voters had to mostly just stomach bad writing (this year, the level of writing is probably much higher).

The works I’m referring to here are of course the short story “If You Were an Award, My Love” and the related works SJWs Always Lie, “The Story of Moira Greyland” and “Safe Space as Rape Room” (and maybe the work of the fan artist “Kukuruyo”). These are ugly works manufactured to harass individual members of the SFF community or groups of people that the Rabid Puppies contingency happens to love harassing (women, LGBTI community and so on).

So, what could be done about them? Unfortunately, not much.

After reading the WSFS constitution, I came up with only two things. If I was running the Worldcon (which I’m not, of course), I would:

Not include them in the Hugo voter packet. (There are zero rules about the voter packet, so it would be completely possible for the Worldcon to exclude the works mentioned above.)

Insert onto the online voting form a statement that says “Midamericon II condemns the hate-speech/whatever featured in Finalist X”.